A blog of Bridge Environment, updated weekly on Thursdays, travel permitting.
Bridge Environment seeks to catalyze a cultural shift in how our society addresses environmental issues. We provide relevant and unbiased advice to any interested party, and also work to educate scientists, policy makers, and the public on how to have a more informative dialog over environmental issues.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Last
week, I concluded a series of blog entries on genetically modified organisms
(GMOs) with the thought that their perceived success or failure will come
down to the extent to which they help with the ultimate conservation issue:
human population and consumption. You would have to have your head in the sand
to be unaware that the human population has grown dramatically; this subject
has been a matter of concern and debate for decades. However, public discourse
today focuses more on our limited resources or the strained capacity of our
natural systems to handle pollution and other anthropogenic effects. Recent
studies even suggest the population will level out in the relatively near
future (UN World Population
Prospects, the 2012 revision). Nevertheless, the underlying concern
prevails. It is common that a general-interest seminar on environmental issues
will end with a knowing acknowledgement that population growth is the real and under-acknowledged
problem. I know people who have chosen to forego pregnancy because of their
concern over population growth. I struggled with this issue myself when
planning my family. However, today I aim to convince you that the real problem
lies not in our numbers or consumption directly, but in our inability to
consciously plan and enact regulations to achieve our desired future.

I
had a formative experience regarding human population control back in 1996. I
was almost 30 and had serendipitously positioned myself as a world expert on
the design of marine protected areas, a subject that had gone from virtually
unknown to the hottest of all marine conservation topics over the preceding
couple of years. Amidst requests to discuss protected areas, it was noteworthy
and intriguing when I was contacted by a regional Colombian government agency (La
Corporación Regional para el Desarrollo Sostenible del Archipiélago de San
Andrés, Providencia, y Santa Catalina, or CORALINA) asking if I could help them
determine the human carrying capacity of the islands within their jurisdiction.
Carrying capacity is an ecological concept that describes the size a population
will achieve if left to grow and thrive in the absence of disturbances. The
concept follows from the idea that competition for resources, the spread of
diseases, and even visibility to predators all increase as a population grows.
If the population is left undisturbed, these forces will eventually balance out
new growth, leaving the population at a stable size, its carrying capacity.

In
their question, though, I realized that CORALINA was not asking me just how
many people could be sustained on the islands. In a sense, the population was
already at its carrying capacity. Food consumed on the islands was shipped in
from elsewhere and water could be procured through desalinization or shipped in
as well. The natural limit on human population in the islands was a matter of
taste. If the population grew, people would face greater crowding and its
associated effects, such as pollution and the economic costs from increasing
demands for resources. The real concern of CORALINA was how many people could
live on the islands while maintaining healthy natural ecosystems, particularly
coral reefs. I steered them away from worrying about the number of people
living on the island, largely because of the insurmountable political challenge
of securing and executing the authority to do anything about it. Instead, I encouraged
them to enact a marine zoning plan that would manage their resources conscientiously.
Specifically, we explored the limits of their coral reefs. These limits
translated into trade-offs among competing human objectives, whether between scuba
ecotourism and fishing or between small-scale artisanal and industrial-scale
commercial fishing.

Though
the Colombians received this advice well, a lack of control over human
population size was frustrating. At first glance, it does seem like population
size would be a good focus for efforts to address environmental issues. China
certainly thought so in enacting its one-child policy. However, their success at
slowing and halting population growth has hardly resulted in healthy
environments. China suffers from some of the worst air and water pollution in
the world and their resource consumption continues to grow rapidly. Less-authoritarian
economic means to control population have been developed over time, and now
primarily focus on empowering women. Doing so typically leads to higher levels
of consumption as parents invest more in fewer kids and produce global citizens
who consume resources at higher levels. Whether via Chinese-style authoritarian
rule or a gentler western approach, we can produce political-economic systems
that discourage further human population growth. However, these efforts are
associated with higher per capita resource use, which limits their
environmental benefits.

If
population control isn’t the solution, is technology the answer? Here we run
into a phenomenon called the efficiency paradox, where efficiency gains from
technology are balanced out by additional uses. As an example, consider a
Stanford Engineering Department water recycling project I participated in a few
years ago. The engineers on the project were brilliant and energetic, and had
the tools necessary to design cost effective water processing plants that could
work on a building- or small-neighborhood-scale. In its cheapest form, such a
system would replace the use of municipal water for landscaping, a major source
of water use. I had to temper their excitement, though, by pointing out how the
efficiency paradox would play out. Home owners would essentially be provided
with a cheap additional source of water, and using that source would make them
feel they were contributing to environmental health. For some, the new
technology might reduce overall water use substantially. For others, it would
encourage them to switch from native xeriscaping (drought-tolerant landscaping)
to backyard rainforests. There would most likely be some overall water savings
at the local level, but not nearly as much as the increase in efficiency would
suggest. Worse still, the savings at the local level would affect regional
water markets. In California, water is a limited resource over which
residential, industrial, agricultural, and environmental interests compete
fiercely. Free up some water on the residential side and most of those savings
would be absorbed by other sectors. In short, local water recycling would only have
a mild effect on the overall consumption of water but would affect its
distribution and economics.

If
population control and technology won’t save us, could smart use work? Like we
did in Colombia, it is possible to look at the natural limits of systems and
plan our use such that we choose how we want to trade-off competing objectives.
If we used this approach widely, we would have an environment that would be far
from pristine. However, it would provide us with levels of service that
represented a trade-off between a cleaner, more natural world and economic use.
Rather than capping population to control resource use, we would cap resource
use to control population. With smart systems, the price of a resource plays a
key role. When a resource is in short supply, regulations would limit its use
and drive its price up. The high price would discourage use, leading to a
carrying-capacity-like balance. Left without a planning exercise to monitor and
limit resource consumption, shortages and high prices will still ultimately
limit resource use at a carrying capacity. It will just do so in a way that may
not match the attributes we would like from this system.

Moreover,
planning decisions of this sort are far less painful if made when resources are
still plentiful. Look at any fishery that has been overfished. The real goal of
a rebuilding plan is to take charge of the system and deliver a more appealing
combination of societal benefits in the future. Getting there once the resource
is depleted requires a lot more pain and suffering than enacting similar
regulations when the stock is still healthy.

So
what’s keeping us from this higher functioning system? Denial and a lack of discipline.
We have a tendency to procrastinate tackling long-term planning exercises, focusing
on short-term crises instead. Also, for a whole host of reasons related to our
psychology and history, we often view long-term planning exercises in terms of
addressing a problem. The existence of a problem is something that can be
debated, and such debates tend to stall any action. But a long-term planning
exercise isn’t a problem. It’s an opportunity to work out what we want from the
resources nature provides before we hit their limits. In addition to reframing
this whole approach in a more accurate and appealing light, we require
discipline…to get scientists to engage in useful advice, to get the interested
public to honestly discuss and negotiate over sometimes-conflicting objectives,
to study options for monitoring and control, and ultimately to make hard
decisions for what blend of performance we want from systems that cannot give
everyone everything. These decisions are far easier, though, if we exert
discipline and make them before we have stressed resources to the point that
short-term sacrifice is necessary to rehabilitate them.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

This
is the final entry in a three-part series about genetically modified organisms
(GMOs)

Over the preceding three weeks, I have discussed human, pig, and environmental health concerns
surrounding genetically modified (GM) foods, also known as GMOs. I argued that,
by focusing on short-term human health considerations, GMO opponents have
distracted us from more realistic and challenging long-term human and environmental
health concerns.

All
of these concerns are exacerbated and potentially eclipsed, though, by economic
and political dynamics. Often, people who bring up economic and political
concerns sound like conspiracy theorists. I promise to keep this discussion
rational and grounded in well-studied human behaviors. To make sense of this situation,
we need to examine monopoly power, intellectual property rights, and the
political influence of money.

In
general, western economies rely on competition to maximize collective benefit.
According to theory and much practice, competition among companies lowers
prices so that more consumers can enjoy them and spurs innovation towards
better products and more efficient production. Even though companies lose
profits from competition, collectively society does better because of the
benefits to consumers. In contrast, companies that secure monopolies can drive
prices up and slack off on in innovation to the detriment of consumers and
society in general. For these reasons, many economic rules and regulations
exist to deter monopolies and encourage competition.

There
is one major exception to this rule: intellectual property, or ownership over
ideas. The idea could be a musical composition, a new drug, or a GM technology.
When it comes to intellectual property, we explicitly allow monopolies for
periods of time, typically 20 years. Even though monopoly conditions allow the
owner of the idea or technology to charge much higher prices than a free market
would sustain, we allow them this reward for investment in innovation. If drug
companies couldn’t recoup costs of research into new drugs (both successful and
failed attempts) by charging a premium for their products, they would invest
less in new cures. Agricultural companies like Monsanto make large investments
in crop improvements using GM and other technology in part because intellectual
property laws allow them to monopolize the market for their new seeds. The US
Supreme Court recently ruled that companies cannot patent naturally-occurring
genes but did affirm the legality of patenting altered genomes of the GM
variety.

Thus,
our effort to spur innovation comes with the cost of monopoly power. Companies
that develop GMOs can use this monopoly power in several ways. They typically
only allow farmers to purchase GM seeds if the farmers sign agreements that
prohibit them from replanting next year’s crops using seeds they produced this
year. Instead, they have to buy new seeds from the company every year.
Companies also charge more than they would under competition. Without
competition, companies can charge a price equal to the net benefit that their
product provides to farmers. Thus, under monopolies all of the benefit of a new
technology goes to the company. With competition, the prices would be driven
down to the cost of manufacturing the seeds without regard to what it cost to
develop them. Thus, under competition farmers and consumers would gain all of
the benefit. Our system of intellectual property rights favors the companies.

A
system with companies as the primary beneficiaries of financial gains has
potential political implications. Though the US political system is driven by
votes, it is incontrovertible that money plays an outsized role. It buys
advertisements that allow a candidate to introduce themself to the public in
the most flattering of lights and to raise concerns, real or imagined, about
their opponent. It also buys complex get-out-the-vote operations, which
identify geographically favorable neighborhoods for the candidate and seek to
register residents and get them to the polls. As a result, the candidate with
the most money typically wins the election, making politicians potentially
susceptible to pressure from contributors. As a result of recent US Supreme
Court action overturning campaign spending legislation, companies can donate
unlimited funds to politicians. In doing so, they may be able to shape laws and
regulations. For example, campaign contributions most likely played a key role
in the recent defeat of US legislation to label GM foods and an unrelated
defeat of widely supported regulations to tighten registration requirements for
gun sales. Monopoly power and money could also affect the science to understand
potential human and environmental health effects. In order to avoid this undue
influence, we need regulatory agencies that are independent of political
influence and sufficiently funded to do their work. My own observations on
political influence on the detailed regulatory process would suggest that it is
relatively mild. However, ongoing government budget cuts do threaten the work
capacity of government agencies.

In
the previous three blog entries, I argued that environmental effects of GMOs
raise important concerns worthy of immediate additional study, and that
long-term human health effects may also be of concern. These conclusions are
based on the idea that the regulatory system is fair and thorough, traits that
monopoly power and political influence may challenge. In order to restore and
maintain the public’s trust in government regulators it is crucial that they
are shielded from political influence and funded sufficiently.

To
conclude, GMOs are an inevitable part of modern food supply and a logical step forward
in the production of better food organisms. Because this technology has the
potential for rapid and drastic change, we need to study carefully the acute
human health, long-term human health, and ecological risks. At present,
evidence suggests that acute human health risks are minimal but the jury is out
on the other two forms of risk. Unless we can maintain independent and
effective regulatory agencies, we run the risk of missing important concerns
until they become major problems.

Even
with effective regulators, the ultimate judgment regarding GMOs will come down
to their contribution to sustaining a human population that has grown
dramatically and continues to increase resource consumption per person. Next
week, I will discuss the “population problem.”

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

This
entry is the second in a three-part series about genetically modified organisms
(GMOs)

Not quite the zombie apocalypse, but should we worryabout the ecological effects of a GMO invasion?

Two weeks ago, I discussed human health concerns surrounding genetically modified (GM) foods, also known as GMOs. Last week, I followed up with a scathing critique of a new study on pigs that claimed to show health
problems from GMOs. In both entries, I argued that we do not have scientific
evidence to suggest GMOs would pose widespread accute health problems, but that
there is the possibility of long-term effects and rare allergic reactions. We
need more testing to resolve those concerns. Today, I write about environmental
effects, which are more complicated and potentially worrisome because GMOs are
designed to have novel ecological characteristics and their effects will reach
beyond the farms where they are raised. Morevoer, the nature of ecological science
makes the consequences of these characteristics harder to monitor and
distinguish from background noise.

GMOs
can be made with nutrition or flavor in mind, but most are designed to change the
ecological balance of a farm. Many GM crops have genes that provide chemical
defenses against insects, shifting the balance towards healthy crops and away
from infestations. Others have high tolerance of herbicides, which encourages
farmers to use more harmful chemicals to keep weeds at bay. Still others are
designed to grow faster and more efficiently, creating a super population.
While these three ecological changes have been goals of farmers for millennia,
GMOs raise more urgent concerns about potential ecological effects because they
can be such a quantum leap from their predecessors. GMOs raise three major
ecological concerns: direct toxicity of GMO chemical traits on non-pest
animals, indirect toxicity of pollution emanating from GMO farms, and the spread
of GMOs themselves beyond their farms or enclosures.

Let’s
start with the concern about GMOs’ effects on non-pest animals. In theory, internal
chemical defenses seem like a wonderful idea. Put the pesticide inside the
plant in a form that doesn’t affect toxicity in humans, and keep pests down
without having to spray as many chemicals. However, concerns have been raised
about the effect these plants may have on non-pest organisms. Honeybees
particularly stir this controversy. Since late 2006, honeybee hives have
suffered increased rates of colony collapse disorder. Research has identified a
number of common characteristics of collapsing hives, particularly a higher
pathogen load in individual bees. Rather than representing a new epidemic,
though, bees are apparently succumbing to diseases because of increased stress,
much in the same way that people don’t die directly from HIV/AIDS but from
diseases they can no longer fight off. The source of stress is still unclear, with
some signs pointing to the increased use of a certain class of pesticide called
neonicotinoids. However, the cause is still unresolved and many casual
observers believe the culprit is pollen from pesticide-containing GM crops.
Even if GM crops are not to blame in this case, it does seem plausible that
crops engineered to be toxic to pest insects might affect non-pest ones as
well.

While
certain crops are designed to reduce the need for insecticides, others are made
to tolerate higher concentrations of herbicides, allowing farmers to use
chemistry to fight weeds more aggressively. Thus, while insecticide use has
generally dropped with the advent of GM crops, herbicide use has increased and
is leading to tougher weeds that are harder for non-GMO farmers to contend with
(Benbrook 2009, but keep in
mind this report was not peer reviewed). Though the overall change in chemical
use is complicated, it is safe to say that the use of GM crops has changed the
sort of chemical pollution coming off of farms.

Crops
are not the only GMOs being developed for food consumption. AquaAdvantage
salmon, also known as the Frankenfish, have been approved by the US’s Food and
Drug Administration. Until now, these GMOs have been raised in contained
systems. However, they will no doubt replace more natural versions of Atlantic
salmon in penned farms around the world (primarily in Norway, Chile, the UK,
Canada, and the US). These pens let seawater flow through, and that water
carries uneaten food, salmon fecal matter, and diseases from the pens to
surrounding oceans, bays, and river mouths. Current studies suggest that it
requires less food to produce GM salmon than their non-GM counterparts. On the
surface, this characteristic appears to be an environmental benefit. Salmon
feed typically contains substantial amounts of wild-caught forage fish, and
more efficient salmon production would mean lighter pressure on the forage fish
stocks and less pollution because of GM technology. These gains would quickly
turn to losses, though, if GM technology spurs more intensive salmon farming.
This is a likely scenario if the technology makes these practices more
profitable. Disease is a greater concern. Epidemics occur when diseases have a
high chance of infecting new hosts before the original one’s immune system
fights it off or it dies trying. Farms are prone to epidemics in the same way
that classrooms are—the concentration of potential hosts mean that one
infection can become dozens in short order. GM salmon are likely to have a
harder time fighting off disease because there are usually fundamental
trade-offs in what an organism can do. Because GM salmon grow so quickly, their
immune systems are likely to be weaker. As a result, GM salmon farms are likely
to have a higher rate of epidemics than non-GM farms. When disease outbreaks
occur, farms can potentially expose nearby natural populations. Given the poor
state of salmon stocks around the world, disease from farms poses a real threat.

Finally,
let’s consider the effects that GMOs may themselves have. Farms are rarely
sealed off from surrounding environments. Plants naturally disperse by
broadcasting pollen and later, seeds by wind or animal carrier. In this way GM
genes and whole individuals can be carried or blown into adjacent farms,
forests, and fields, where they can crowd out natural competitors or
contaminate non-GM crops. And though GM salmon are designed to be sterile
females, the pens they are kept in are fairly flimsy and prone to damage from storms
and from hungry sea lions. Large-scale salmon escapes are common, and their
pressure on the food web and crowding of natural habitats can potentially
further degrade the poor state of natural salmon stocks.

All
of these concerns are prevalent in non-GM salmon production and the changes GM
salmon would induce are speculation. Nevertheless, they represent real risks
that haven’t been the focus of much debate because concerns over food safety
have dominated. By focusing on our most prominent fear (lack of control of our
food system and our immediate health), opponents of GMOs have distracted us
from more realistic and challenging concerns.

These
challenges are further exacerbated by the difficulty in identifying clear signs
of environmental harm. Environmental systems are notoriously variable, affected
by many non-GM-related influences (e.g., natural climate variability and
human-induced climate change). This variability makes it exceedingly difficult
to tease out the ecological effects of GMOs. Here, much more study is needed
that combines micro-view studies of chemical flows in farm-influenced ecosystems
with macro-views of ecological changes occurring on and around farms.

As
much as ecological concerns require our attention, GMOs have important economic
and political effects that may be of even greater concern. Stay tuned. They
will be the subject of next week’s blog entry.